Supply and Demand in Disaggregated Keynesian Economies with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis

We study the effects of supply and demand shocks in a general disaggregated model with multiple sectors, factors, and input-output linkages, as well as downward nominal wage rigidities and a zero lower bound constraint. In response to shocks, some sectors become tight and operate at full capacity while others become slack and under-utilize the resources available to them. We use the model to understand how the Covid-19 crisis, an omnibus of various supply and demand shocks, affects output, unemployment, and inflation. Throughout the analysis, we focus on the role of the production network and of the elasticities of substitution. We establish that under some conditions, the details of the production network can be summarized by simple sufficient statistics. We use these sufficient statistics to conduct global comparative statics, and illustrate the intuition for our results using a nonlinear ASAD representation of the model. Negative sectoral supply shocks and shocks to the sectoral composition of demand are necessarily stagflationary, whereas negative aggregate demand shocks are deflationary. The effects of the former are stronger and the effects of the latter are weaker with stronger complementarities in production and in consumption. These shocks interact and are amplified or mitigated through nonlinearities. We quantify our results using disaggregated data from the U.S.

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